As the eco-system of business evolves into a more opportunistic convergence of business partners into an eco-system of value, similar to the notion of a value chain, but a more loosely coupled exchange of goods and services, the need is increasingly being felt for an upfront design of an architecture structure to enable smooth and measurable business operations.

Eco-system architecture defines the foundation of interaction between a set of semi-autonomous business entities that interact with each other using a set of configurable policies that define the valid business interactions among potential and prospective participants, such as business partners: providers, consumers and brokers.

Eco-system architecture extends Enterprise Architecture in a similar way that EA extends the notion of solution architecture. EA is analogous to "city planning" whereas ECSA is analogous to planning how the economy of the whole nation is structured through a set of rules, policies, standards and structures .

Even though SOA has been around for years, the community at large did not have a clear declaration of intent and "values", although individually, there appeared to be a large degree of consensus. Formalizing this consensus, a group of seasoned SOA practitioners got together recently and agreed to a high level declaration of intent.